Authors: Patricia Correll
Background:Lumos is an ethically approved program that sheds light on the patient journey through the NSW health system to help identify opportunities for improving patient outcomes and experiences. This is done by linking deidentified data from general practices (GPs) and linking it with other health service data to provide a unique and more comprehensive view of patient pathways. The data asset continually grows and spans regional, remote and metropolitan areas across NSW.
Aim: Lumos is a large scale model and thrives on the collaboration between NSW health, primary health networks and GPs, growing from a pilot program in 2016 with 5 GPs to close to 700 GPs today, and representing close to half the NSW population.At a statewide level, Lumos is used to underpin large scale improvements and shifts the system from high volume care to value based health care. Some of the major initiatives supported by Lumos include to collaborative commissioning, integrated care, and urgent care services. Lumos enables dynamic modelling as well as the monitoring and evaluation of the initiatives to better understand health service usage, and impacts that can support current and future innovation in health service design and delivery.
Results: Lumos delivers reliable and actionable data that improves patient care; with participating GPs receiving a customised report about patients who visit their practice that can be used to drive local change and improve care. Statewide findings produce unique insights that relate to continuity of care, chronic disease management, impacts of primary care to reduce readmission to hospital, or attendance to emergency department.
Conclusions: Lumos continues to grow, with more GPs enrolling to participate and datasets captured growing too, enabling a more comprehensive view to support the system to deliver value based health care and improve patient outcomes and experiences.